The 5 Universal Truths Of Having Clammy Hands

4. Sometimes,
the clamminess can be more than just a little problematic.

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Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed

As in, more than just kind of nasty and embarrassing. Nine
years ago, I was a junior in high school and taking a lovely
little test called the ACT. The first time I took it, I bombed
the science portion, so I hunkered down and studied hard to do
better the next time around. When the next test date came, I
felt slightly more confident.

And then. And THEN. I got to the last section — the science
section, because of course — and everything changed. I’d
noticed my pencil slipping out of my grip throughout the test,
because, well, clamminess does that, but this was 17 years into
my life, and I was used to the old
pencil-down-wipe-palms-continue routine that is still instinct.

But! This time, the palm-wiping didn’t work. The questions were
tricky, and I was getting worried, which manifested itself on
my hands. My fingers kept slipping down to the tip of the
pencil, no matter how many times I changed my grip. The more I
panicked about how slippery my palm was, the sweatier it got. I
waved my hands in the air like I really, truly, cared, which
offered enough temporary relief to finish a few questions, but
I didn’t finish the section. And given my less-than stellar
science acumen, the questions I did answer were totally
wrong. That much was reflected in my score a few weeks later.

All of this is to say that I blame everything bad that’s
happened to me since that test on my palms. For all I know, a
better future literally slipped through my fingers that
day. An alternate version of myself, with hands of a milder
microclimate, would have passed that section with flying
colors, gotten into Hogwarts, and invented a spell to cure
sufferers of sweaty palms (as well as one to stop myself from
waving back at someone who wasn’t even waving at me).